The prestigious literary award, International Booker Prize, has been won for the first time by a novel that was originally written in Mandarin Chinese. Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King, has been awarded the prize in 2026, winning the pair an even split of the £50,000 prize. Yáng and King are also the first Taiwanese and Taiwanese-American winners of the International Booker Prize, which recognises the best fiction translated into English.
Announced during a ceremony at Tate Modern, London on Tuesday 19th May, judging chair and novelist Natasha Brown said the novel: “pulls off an incredible double feat… both a romance and an incisive postcolonial novel”.
Taiwan Travelogue centres a fictional Japanese writer, Aoyama Chizuko, on a government-sponsored trip to Taiwan in 1938. A ‘love letter to food’, the writer embarks on a culinary tour with the assistance of an interpreter, with whom she falls in love with along the way. The novel has already won several accolades including Taiwan’s highest literary honour, the Golden Tripod award for the original Mandarin Chinese publication, and Lin King’s English translation won the US National book award for translated literature in 2024.
Taiwan Travelogue author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ and translator Lin King at the International Booker Prize 2026 winner ceremony © David Parry for Booker Prize Foundation.
In her acceptance speech, Yang spoke on Taiwan’s politics, saying: “Some people believe that art and literature must be kept far from politics, but I believe that literature cannot be separated from the soil in which it has grown.
“In this sense, literature, on a fundamental level, cannot disentangle itself from politics. When surveying the modern history of Taiwan’s literature, it is apparent that we writers have been asking the same question for the past century: What kind of future do the people of Taiwan want?”
Yin added in her speech: “My goal for myself and my fellow translators is to bring so many voices from Taiwan into English that no one can reduce Taiwan’s literature to a monolith, because we are not a chorus but a cacophony, self-contradicting and unruly, just like any healthy, robust democracy.”
